Roku Continues to Hold its Own as the Leading Independent OTT Platform

Roku continues to hold its own as one of the leading OTT platforms as the company announced today that 13.4 million active accounts streamed a record 1 billion hours of video and music in December 2016, and that Roku customers streamed a total of 9 billion hours in all of 2016.

According to Nielsen, in December 2016, Roku accounted for 48 percent of active streaming players in the U.S. For the full year of 2016, the company experienced record growth resulting in nearly $400 million dollars in revenue. The Media and Licensing segment, which includes content consumption and promotion, licensing, and advertising sales on the platform exceeded $100 million in high-margin revenue in 2016.

A big driver of Roku’s success has been the way in which it has integrated its platform into connected TVs. As of Dec. 2016 following the company’s launch into Mexico, there were 100 Roku TV models available in the North American market. Roku TVs accounted for no less that 13 percent of all US smart TV sales. The company’s partner brands include Hisense, Hitachi, Insignia, Sharp and TCL, the company that has been relaunching the BlackBerry brand at Mobile World Congress this week. TCL uses the Roku TV program to build all of its smart TV models in the US and has climbed from the 9th largest brand in 2015 to the 6th in 2016, becoming the fastest growing TV brand in America.

“Our strategy to grow accounts, engage our audience, and increase monetization is clearly working with 46 percent year-over-year growth in active accounts, 70 percent year-over-year growth in streaming hours and 100+ percent year-over-year growth in media and licensing revenues,” said Roku Founder and CEO Anthony Wood. “The investments we are making in our platform to enable advertisers and content publishers to reach our rapidly growing audience are paying off, and we are still in the early stages of our capabilities.”

Roku is also reportedly in advanced talks to raise an additional $200 million round of funding, in a post-money valuation of approximately $1.5 billion, according to Fortune. The round will be led by U.S.-based investors, one source told Fortune, but “not standard Silicon Valley venture firms.” Roku has raised $210 million in funding so far from a range of investors, some of whom have a vested interest in seeing an independent platform — i.e. one that isn’t owned by Google, Facebook, Apple or Amazon — succeed, including News Corp, Sky, Fidelity Investments, Menlo Ventures, Hearst Ventures, Viacom, Fox Networks, and Netflix.